HP S700 Pro (1TB) Review

If you’re reading this and asking yourself, “HP makes SSDs?” you’re not alone.

We thought the same thing on getting word of the company's newest line of sober-looking solid-state drives. But HP has, indeed, flown under the radar in the highly competitive client-SSD market, offering branded drives for some time, built on other makers' internals and qualified in-house. Dubbed the S700 Pro, this new line comprises midrange SSDs built around 3D TLC NAND memory. As we’ve stated in recent reviews of other 3D TLC-based drives, this kind of memory is all the rage these days in SSDs for consumers.

In fact, we’ve just covered, in parallel, the launches of several new drives with this kind of memory inside. We tested a handful, among them the WD Blue 3D SSD, the SanDisk Ultra 3D, and the Intel SSD 545s. This is in addition to the granddaddy/flag-bearer among 3D TLC NAND drives, the very popular and well-regarded Samsung SSD 850 EVO.

HP is offering both Pro and non-Pro versions of the S700 drive, with the Pro offering higher performance ratings—as you'd expect. The unique angle with this drive, aside from the name recognition conferred by the HP brand, is that HP states its new SSDs work hand-in-glove with its HP Setup Manager (HPdst.exe) software that comes pre-installed on HP computers. According to HP, this aids a smooth upgrade, wherein you remove the spinning-platter drive from your HP laptop or desktop and slide one of these bad boys inside. Setup Manager acts as a front-end facilitator for file transfers from your old PC to a new one, as well as a backup-routine coordinator and a tool for managing compatible HP hardware, including HP printers.

We didn't have the opportunity to test the S700 Pro in this context, but if you are looking to upgrade an HP-branded device, or your business is a mostly-HP shop, there may be some added appeal to this drive, versus like-priced competitors. Beyond that, though, this a sleek but very bare-bones package, a drive-in-a-box and nothing more. Let's see how it shakes out.

Design & Features

The HP S700 Pro comes in four capacities: 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB. (We tested the biggest.) It uses a Silicon Motion (SMI) controller, the not-uncommon SM2258, along with Micron’s TLC 3D NAND and some custom-tuned HP firmware.

If you aren’t familiar with TLC 3D memory: Lingo aside, it’s the kind now common in late-model midrange drives. TLC memory is usually the most affordable variety, while still offering decent performance. The “3D” portion of its name reflects the fact that the memory in these drives is constructed in interconnected layers, instead of laid down solely in modules side-by-side (a "planar" design, how non-3D SSDs have been manufactured). Over time, memory NAND modules have seen their densities increase and their cells, by necessity, reduced in size to the point that the planar approach became increasingly problematic. Among other issues, as cells shrank and came packed closer and closer, cross-cell interference became something to contend with.

Going to a 3D/vertical orientation was the solution, and it should provide a decent runway for future SSD designs, since companies can add more layers to their current 64 to improve capacities. Once that approach hits its limits, memory makers can start shrinking the dies again, and the cycle repeats. (For more on this and other SSD lingo/esoterica, check out our primer Buying a Solid State Drive: 20 Terms You Need to Know.)

The HP S700 Pro is offered only in the familiar 2.5-inch, 7mm-thick form factor, not as an M.2 "gumstick"-design drive. (See our guide The Best M.2 Solid-State Drives, Tested for more on those.) Nor is it being offered in a much faster PCI Express-bus variety. This drive uses the Serial ATA interface, and the upside, in a sense, is that most computer users who have PCs that require a drive upgrade can use a SATA drive like this. This drive should be compatible with millions of PCs out in the wild. It's coming in where the volume is.

The 1TB version of the S700 Pro we tested is specified to run at speeds up to 570MB per second for sequential reads, and 525MB per second for sequential writes. HP rates the smaller-capacity versions a tad slower, as we often see in any line of mainstream SSDs with wide-ranging capacities. (Usually, the lower capacities get the slightly lesser ratings.)

As far as on-drive features go, the only one that HP flogs on its product page for this drive is error protection. This is, of course, invisible to the end user, and it is impossible to quantify from a reviewer's standpoint. HP also lists the option to make use of External DRAM Cache in its data sheet, so there’s that, too, but as we’ve seen before with Samsung SSDs and DRAM-employing schemes like Samsung's Rapid Mode, they tend to inflate benchmark numbers in much greater measure than they affect real-world performance.

When it comes to pricing, HP is being aggressive right out of the gate with the S700 Pros, with the following prices on Amazon at this writing...

CAPACITY

PRICE AT TIME OF REVIEW

128GB

$63

256GB

$117

512GB

$207

1TB

$379

This is reasonably aggressive pricing, a bit under 50 cents per gigabyte at all capacities and increasingly cheaper per gigabyte at the larger sizes. Now, it's still not quite as low as the reigning champ in the 3D TLC space, the Samsung SSD 850 EVO. Because that drive has been on the market for some time, its price has had a change to fall further, and Samsung imposes economies of scale on its drives by manufacturing all the bits itself, unlike competitors that need to source at least some of the components outside. The 500GB version of the SSD 850 EVO, for example, goes for just $175 these days, a nice bargain and our go-to pick at that price level.

HP backs the S700 Pro with a three-year warranty, which is typical among midrange drives, though less than the five-year warranty Samsung offers on the EVO series. Beyond the drive, no accessories come in the box with the S700 Pro, apart from the warranty leaflet and a packet of mounting screws.

Performance Testing

Before we get started here: If you’re new to the world of solid-state drives, a few things are worth noting when it comes to performance.

For starters: If you’re upgrading from a standard spinning hard drive, any modern SSD will be a huge improvement, speeding up boot times and program launches. Most of today’s 2.5-inch SSDs make use of a specific interface, SATA 3.0 (also called "6Gbps SATA"), to achieve maximum speed versus older, but still extant, SATA 2 ports, which top out at 300MB per second. We test all our SATA SSDs on a SATA 3.0-equipped test-bed PC to show their full performance abilities. To get the most speed possible from modern drives, you’ll need a system with SATA 3.0 capability, as well.

If your system is based on almost any recent Intel chipset (or one of the newer AMD chipsets), it has this interface. Be sure before buying, though. If your system is well-aged and doesn’t have SATA 3.0 support, there’s little point in paying a premium for a drive with the maximum possible performance. SATA 3.0-capable drives work fine with previous-generation SATA ports, just at the older interface's speed, so there’s scant reason to pay extra for drive speed that your system can’t take advantage of. Any basic current SSD will work just as well, in that SATA 3.0-less scenario.

AS-SSD (Sequential Read & Write Speeds)

As the name suggests, the AS-SSD benchmark utility is designed to test SSDs, as opposed to traditional spinning hard drives. The sequential tests measure a drive’s ability to read and write large files. Drive makers often quote these speeds, as a theoretical maximum, on the packaging or in advertising.

Sequential speeds are important if you’re working with very large files for image or video editing, or you play lots of games with large levels that take a long time to load with traditional hard drives. We secure-erase all SSDs before running this test.

Well, well, well. We didn’t expect this, but the HP S700 Pro shot right atop our benchmark chart on this first test, albeit by just a few whiskers. Granted, it was within the margin of error of all of the drives in the top half of this chart. But that's still impressive for a brand-new SSD. Perhaps HP’s engineers have dabbed on a secret sauce to the drive’s firmware that allows it to outperform the competition?

...aaaand the party is over. In the sequential-write portion of this test, the S700 Pro fell back to earth, proving once again that when it comes to SSDs, it’s much easier to read things quickly than to write them. This is inherent based on an SSD's design, since it has to erase what's in a block before it can write to it, unlike a hard drive. Its score of 465MB per second is lower than average for this competitive set, but it's still decent for a modern SSD. For what it’s worth, it outpaced WD’s new Blue 3D SSD, which uses a similar variety of memory. (Still, it’s not a huge difference overall, just about 20MB per second.)

AS-SSD (4K Read & Write Speeds)

This test, also a part of the SSD-centric AS-SSD benchmark, measures a drive’s ability to traffic small files. Often overlooked, 4K performance, particularly 4K write performance, is important when it comes to boot speed and program launch times.

When booting up and launching programs, many tiny files get accessed and edited frequently. The faster your drive can write and read these kinds of files (especially dynamic link library, or DLL, files in Windows), the faster your OS will “feel.” Since small files like these get accessed much more frequently than large media or game-level files, a drive’s performance on this test will have a greater impact on how fast a drive feels in everyday use.

When it comes to small reads, the HP S700 Pro landed in the lower quadrant of our leaderboard, but it’s also right next to the Samsung SSD 850 Pro, otherwise one of the top SATA SSDs we have tested to date. It was able to read these small files at a rate of 27.4MB per second, which is quite a bit behind some of competition here. The WD Blue 3D, for example, was able to hit 40.8MB per second, so there’s a bit of a performance delta here.

As for writes...

The results from this test indicate most modern SSDs are quite close on this task type, with the S700 Pro landing mid-pack. Its performance was equivalent to what we saw from other 3D TLC drives, so no surprises here.

Anvil's Storage Utilities

Like AS-SSD, Anvil is an SSD-specific set of drive-benchmarking tests. We'll report here the Overall Score, which is derived from Anvil's Read and Write scores with the utility running at default settings (that is, with 100 percent incompressible data). Again, the drive was secure-erased before the test was run.

Not too surprisingly, the S700 Pro scored about average in this test, in the lower-middle of a crowded field and outpaced by the WD/SanDisk/Intel 3D TLC SSDs. Interestingly, though, it outpaced the older Toshiba OCZ VX500, which was once a high-end SATA SSD. Overall, this result just reinforces the general knowledge about SATA SSDs these days: that most perform relatively similarly. A sway of 200 points up or down on this test is not all that significant.

Crystal DiskMark (QD32 Testing)

Crystal DiskMark uses incompressible data for testing, which stresses most modern SSDs quite a bit since they rely on data compression to achieve their maximum level of performance. This particular subtest is designed to replicate the duties of an SSD located inside a Web server, as it's asked to perform a smattering of small reads, 4K in size. While it's reading these files, a queue of 32 outstanding requests is lined up (a "queue depth" 32 requests deep). That's typical of a high-volume Web server, which has to fulfill requests coming in at the same time from various clients.

Over time, we’ve seen a few tiers emerge from the results of this test with our SATA drives, and the S700 Pro placed in the second-to-last tier for both reads and writes. To be fair to HP, this test is grueling, and not indicative of a load that a consumer/client drive would typically face. But we like to run it regardless as a very worst-case scenario. That said, plenty of other drives did better here, though none of this lot is designed for 24/7 server duties.

PCMark 7 Secondary Storage Test

This test underscores a SATA-SSD truth, again: That in the real world, all of these drives feel similarly fast. The top three-quarters of these drives in the chart above were all within the margin of error of one another, and the S700 Pro was smack in the middle of this batch. A sway of +/-150 points, or thereabouts, is not significant here, meaning that most of these drives are within striking distance of each other.

Conclusion

The HP S700 Pro showed no weak areas on our testing, but its performance was run-of-the-mill as SATA drives go. As an upgrade for shoppers with an HP-brand laptop or desktop, we can see some appeal here, but we think HP will have to get even more aggressive on the pricing to get far beyond that. We can’t really see a typical home or business upgrader opting for one of these over, say, a Samsung SSD 850 EVO without a clear savings incentive, unless they're an all-HP shop and want to employ the Setup software.

Now, that is not necessarily a problem; a solid SSD is a solid SSD. At worst, the S700 Pro simply throws HP’s hat in the ring, giving an HP-branded choice to buyers or IT folks who have brand loyalty or fleets of HP systems to maintain. The drive otherwise, though, doesn’t offer much beyond what is currently available from the rest of the TLC-NAND lot. So it’s not really moving the market forward, just adding another competitively priced option with name-brand recognition.

That’s compelling...if the price is right. And in the SATA market, price breakthroughs are about as much as you can hope for. We don't expect to see new SSDs hit new levels in SATA-drive performance, given the limitations of the interface. We see this SSD like we do many business IT products: designed to be functional and long-lasting instead of flashy.

According to the most basic SSD metrics, this is a successful debut drive in this new line. But if you’re not an HP-loyal customer, you want to see more price-drop action. Otherwise, you should also be looking at more-attractive, accessory-laden options.